Why brands should be asking for more data from gaming influencers

Using gaming influencers has become a “go-to” approach for many brands in the gaming space. Influencers provide the ability to get in front of an audience in a more authentic way. They also provide an avenue for creative campaign concepts like the recent Pringles campaign in partnership with XBOX.

While I’m a fan of these creative campaigns and the way gaming influencers can be used for broad brush awareness campaigns, I still feel brands need to do more due diligence.

Just because a gaming content creator and influencer hails from a specific country may not mean their viewing audience is from the same country.

More importantly, the social and subscriber following may not be the same audience that watches the content due to social sharing and visibility algorithms.

This presents a challenge for data-driven marketers because what they get sent by the influencer is something like this.

The above is actually from a real-life gaming influencer with nearly 2M YouTube subscribers and 360K followers on Instagram.

Getting clarity and granularity

What do you notice? At a top level it looks interesting but there’s no detail. This is a top level, aggregated view across all their social accounts. What about the age group breakdown of Instagram vs. YouTube? What is the country split of viewership for the past 10 YouTube videos and how does it compare with the overall country split? Is there a difference in overall female following between different social channels?

As a data-driven marketer these are the types of questions I would need answered before choosing whether this gaming influencer has exactly what I need to meet my objectives.

It would be too easy to go “yes they’ll do” because the top-level stats look appealing.

More importantly, if the rate card looks like this then you should want to know the specifics of their audience on Instagram vs. Twitter so you can choose the more appropriate option.

Avoid the gaming influencer “follower” and “subscriber” trap

There is a trap waiting for all marketers by blindly using the “follower” or “subscriber” numbers because this gives no context or appreciation of reach and engagement.

The follower numbers may be small but if those followers help share a message or piece of content the potential reach could massively outweigh the number of followers. On the flip side, if the platforms use algorithms to determine what content you see and when then even with a large follower count there is no guarantee the intended audience will see the content.

As the space continues to evolve, we look forward to seeing brands ask gaming influencers the hard questions and working with them to gain the answers. This two-way process will enable a greater level of transparency for all parties and ensure brands work with open eyes to get relevant ROI.

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Founder & CEO at Cheesecake Digital

Philip is the Founder of Cheesecake Digital and has been involved in esports since 2001. He has written for multiple digital marketing and gaming publications including the BBC and Guinness Book of World Records.

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